Resolve/Cause licensing heartache

[todb]

Hi! I'd love to take a look at what you're doing, but the GPL licensing makes it unlikely I could ever incorporate your work on anything I work on, both personally and professionally.

This PR attempts to resolve this potential contribution problem.

Verification Steps

• See all references to licensing are changed from GPL to BSD
• Keep the LGPL license mentions and material

[carmaa]

Hi Tod, thanks for the PR! Understand the heartache, but not sure I will BSD license this right off the bat. IANAL, so let me read up on the finer nuances of licensing and get back to this.

[todb-r7]

:) No problem. IANAL either, which is exactly why I prefer the much shorter, less ambiguous licensing terms. Many projects have many reasons for going with GPL over BSD, and maybe you have those reasons.

Usually, though, I've found that people choose GPL because it's a default, not because they care to actually restrict the usage. This is why I tend to treat GPL licensing as a bug in projects I care about, and provide patches.

[rbsec]

FYI, the copyright for any code contributed by third parties is still owned by them, and that code has been included in this project under the GPLv3 license. Because of this, if you want to change the license on an existing open source project, you need to get the approval of everyone who has contributed code to that project (because you don't have the rights to change the license on their code).

In this case there are only a few other people who have contributed code, so it should be fairly simple to get permission from all of them (if you chose to go down that route, and they're all happy with BSD/whatever).

But yeah, it's not quite as simple as just merging a PR...

[todb-r7]

Thanks for the input, @rbsec. Is this legal advice? :)

Fwiw, I don't believe that's true in a practical sense. Copyright is its own brand of sticky issue, and besides, the primary contributor can merely determine how likely those contributors are to sue for relief over a compatible licensing change.

All I want to do is code. I don't want to law. I'm barely qualified for the former as it is.

[rbsec]

As with both of you guys, IANAL, but there there have been a number of different discussions of this in the past (such as here and here) which invariably come to the same conclusion. VLC did a big license change a few years back and they talk about some of the issues.

But yeah, the likelihood of anyone caring enough to take any kind of action over this on this kind of project is minimal (especially given that most of the other commits to this project are trivial, and could be easily re-implemented if required).

Could I also sugesst that you consider the DBAD Public License?

[todb-r7]

Ah, sweet, thanks for the links, @rbsec.